Show HN: We've been working on this idea, would love feedback | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We've been working on this idea, would love feedback

userealtalk.com

33 pointstonysusername64 comments

Here's my take. I grew up in my parent's brick-and-mortar retail business: a four-store bicycle shop that's one of the largest and busiest in the nation. We were an early pioneer on the Internet, one of the very first to sell bicycle parts online back in 1995. These days, they don't do much e-commerce but brick-and-mortar business has grown a lot and the management is still tech-savvy.

Here are the problems that I see:

1. Employees are busy. In the bike shop, you're constantly running around, helping this customer and that customer, answering the phone, taking in a repair, doing a demo, etc. It's going to be very hard to get someone on a computer or iPad to do live chat. If an employee is typing on a computer within sight of a customer, the customer will assume that they aren't busy and will interrupt them with a question. The problem is so bad that when my father would go out onto the sales floor to fix a computer, he would put on a fake badge that said something like "DataTech Computer Repair Services" so customers wouldn't think he was a shop employee and interrupt him. Perhaps a speech-to-text interface might work but how is that better than a simple phone call?

2. Non-technical employees (most brick-and-mortar employees) are slow, inaccurate typists. Back when my parent's store was heavy into e-commerce, we quickly found that we needed dedicated guys to take online orders over the phone because most of our guys couldn't touch-type. If your interface requires a lot of typing, the employees and the customers using it aren't going to be happy.

Thanks for sharing!

  answering the phone

That's what this is.

Not according to the video demo on their landing page right now.

The video demo is fine. Text is phone these days and answering a text is exactly the same as answering a phone call asking for more info. A 20 yo retail associate at American Apparel will take to this and figure this out in an hour.

I totally agree! An average teenager/young adult sends 3000 text messages per month. For this generation, text messages are more convenient than phone calls.

I understand where you're going with this now. Employees tap out responses on their smartphones. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer now: you walk in and see an employee looking down at their phone and tapping away. Most people won't assume that they're conversing with a customer. The phone conversation doesn't have the same "hey, I'm busy with another customer right now" effect that an audible phone or in-person conversation has. Customers will assume the worst: that they're being ignored for the sake of some employee's personal texting.

Employees already use there phones while at work to text their friends etc...When a customer walks in.... They would usually put there phone in their pocket and satisfy that walking.

Can't see how they wouldn't use this in the same way.

Floor staff are trained to be proactive rather than reactive. When the customer has already voiced their intent and it doesn't necessitate more interaction you can switch to another channel queue.

Obviously if that's not the dynamic of your shop then this isn't the right tool.

Guess we should update the landing page to show more. Thanks

I assumed they were talking to an AI of some kind. They should do that instead.

I don't think anyone has mentioned this: in my mind, the whole point of calling a business is getting an immediate response.

Most of us are conditioned to treat text as a fundamentally asynchronous medium. Texts aren't something you have to reply to now -- you should get to them eventually, but they don't demand attention in that moment. Much like email, the sender really has no idea when, if ever, the receiver will respond.

Phone calls are different in that they're totally synchronous. The receiver responds immediately, and you're not left in the dark wondering if they're busy. Even if you're put on hold, someone usually answers the phone first to let you know they'll be with you soon.

Phone calls are comforting -- you know for certain that you've been heard, and you get your answer right away. I can't think of a way for text to provide this, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Good point. I would hope that part would be automated so that if a person isn't going to respond within the next 45 seconds requestor gets a message and maybe even an ETA for when they'll have their answer.

How old are you? I am 32 and I agree, but my younger siblings consider a text to be similar to a phone call that demands an immediate response.

I you aren't in a hurry you send a similar message over email.

17. At least in my social circles, it's polite to respond to texts (and Facebook messages) within a couple hours. Texting definitely carries more expectations than email (for example, I'd consider it rude to text back the next day, yet emailing in the morning is A-ok), but it's certainly not on the level of calls.

A complaint about the site: I like to move my mouse near the section I'm reading, but it keeps fading out the part I'm trying to read.

Also, I still don't really understand what does this do? You only give me a form but no additional information.

Thanks for the tip.

RealTalk will enable you to communicate with businesses on your smart phone. Picture a messaging layer on top of your old phone book, but in your hands.

That description is a big turn off. I don't need RealTalk to communicate with businesses on my smartphone. I already have a phone, email and web access on it. Maybe even a dedicated app for that business.

Why not just say "RealTalk lets businesses handle customer service via SMS"?

While at work I regularly use the live chat on websites to get information, and I strongly prefer that over a voice call for a number of reasons[1].

The problem I have with the chats is that they usually lack the ability to escalate an issue. Even tech support chats have you communicate with a single rep for the life of the chat. Will this app have the ability for the employees to transfer the thread to another employee?

[1] I don't like talking on phones, loud calls distract my office mates, I can copy and paste detailed information, and the wait times are often shorter.

Love your initial presentation. The business side console looks a ton more useful than https://talktothemanager.com/.

Might need to find a way to mesh into existing Twitter back workflows for larger enterprise customers. These guys have spent a lot of dough building distributed Twitter workforces. Need to make it ultra facile for them to come over to your more intimate product.

Thanks! Thats on the roadmap.

Hi I'm not sure if this is useful but here in China realtime chat function for buying stuff is commonplace. I heard a stat that something like 40% of all sales on Tmall are closed via chat - be it wechat or aliwangwang. In terms of location based and in app purchase they have moved fast too.

If you need to look at consumer behavior (which for many comments here seems to be a question) it might help to look at what they are doing.

Very cool idea! I am not comfortable giving my phone number to anything that is not a non-corporate person, though. I can't see how you would need to have my phone number, so I'm ambiguous on how it would improve my experience. Everything you'd want to do with SMS could be done with push notifications, and it would be both faster, cheaper, and with higher fidelity.

we won't need your phone number.

Wouldn't the fact that the customer sends an SMS from their phone mean that you now have their phone number? How are you going to respond to the request without having their phone number?

Or is it not using SMS after all? Not sure that's clear from the presentation. The tag line says "Find and text any business in your area." The term "text" is generally synonymous with SMS. If that's not what this is you may want to change the wording.

Nice presentation and solid idea. Initially I don't see the advantage over just directly calling the business. Traditional land line phones are loud, and are quickly answered. A messaging app can easily be silenced. If the user wasn't exactly sure what he/she needed I think speaking to someone is much more efficient than describing via a message.

Biggest advantage is that phone calls are traditionally inaccurate. Names are spelled incorrectly and completely wrong requests are performed often.

^ Agreed

Kind of like https://www.intercom.io/ but for real life?

I see great potential for this with small businesses, I understood from the comments that employees can answer customers using smart phones - which is great, but you need to highlight that value in your presentation, the computer-only screenshot is a bit turn-off. The video is great but it should be skippable in my opinion.

I attempted to create a similar service a few years back, but my concept was more targeted at users searching for local products and services, and not targeting a specific business. We would submit the user request to all matching local businesses. Maybe something to also consider, best of luck.

I'd pay good money for a Whatsapp number that I could use for my business and feed directly into our inbox/CRM tool/whatever; when given the choice our clients seem to overwhelmingly prefer Whatsapp messaging over any other contact method.

I'd write it myself if I had the time.

What kind of business do you have? Are you clients mostly under 30-35?

Yeah. I'm running a small accommodation/guesthouse business in Hong Kong and our demographic is 18-35 expats, mostly European. First contact method is 10% voice / 20% on SMS / 70% on Whatsapp.

Interesting. That's quite a ratio in favor of WhatsApp. We looked into building a WhatsApp hook via OwnerListens but since it's not that popular in the US (where most of our current customers are) we couldn't justify the resources. We'll revisit as we expand internationally. How much would you be willing to pay for such a service.

Interesting idea. Any real customers yet? I am still not sure how would it work for me as a customer? Would I download an app and then communicate with the businesses? If so, why can't I just tweet to them?

Cool concept. My main hesitation around using this product would be companies signing me up for coupons/spam via text messages. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to filter out text message spam...

They wont have access to your phone number. And only consumers can initiate a message. Filters will be built in.

It is a good idea. you may want to better understand why customers may contact a business and make the messaging experience much smoother for instance by having sample text message ready to be used by users.

I don't see the business side of this being super interesting, but the consumer side is awesome.

An app where I can make any request to a business, through my phone, and you sort out the details? That's awesome.

Doesn't sound like you own a business who does lots of customer service/ inbound sales inquiries/ requests from consumers?

I think they are two different problems. Either you're helping my business respond to customer requests more efficiently, or your making it dead simple for me to ask questions/order/talk to a business.

We use LiveChat[0], which even looks like that.

People go to the site, open live chat, ask questions and get real answers immediately.

[0] http://www.livechatinc.com/

99% of retail businesses don't have live chat.

The implementation would be the same thing as this company. I don't understand how it's different.

100% of retail business don't have this this either.

If I understand correctly, this is livechat's model:

I need to ask if the Levi's store at Kanata has a Midnight black 514. To do so, I have to download Levi's app first, use the chat option (that integrates with live chat) and chat from there. The problem is I don't know when I will use the Levi's app again, maybe once more this year? I don't want an useless app to clog my phone.

Here's the RealTalk scenario:

I only have one app "RealTalk" that connects me to Levi's for jeans, Diesel for my shirts and J. crew for my sneakers.

Actually, it's not on the Levi app, it would be on the levi website. Where most people are already at if they have questions about the brand.

Sounds a lot like ownerlistens.com Same consumer facing SMS functionality (masks your number) or an app if you want to avoid fees Backend more fully featured + has an API and supports iBeacons

What percentage of businesses have someone available to answer text messages? My feeling is the answer starts with 0.0 and then may have some more zeros before a non-zero digit occurs.

Surely in any business, there is at least one person sitting around doing nothing worthwhile at any one time? E.g. if you go into a shop, there's a very low chance that everyone working there is actually busy doing something, someone's always standing/sitting around

Why would a business not have someone available? This isn't much different from an employee answering a phone, granted in this case it's the employee's personal phone.

What percentage of businesses have someone available to answer the telephone? This seems more convenient than that.

But it also seems like twitter.

How do you message a business that doesn't follow you privately?

#businessname blah blah blah message blah

Love the presentation and as someone who prefers communications over text messages over a phone call, this has real potential if you can get businesses to respond in a timely manner.

How does the user find the business?

This seems like something that can be done with a facebook personal message or something.

We aggregate business data similar to Foursquare.

Not many businesses are sitting behind their facebook pages to use it as a communication channel for customer service/ sales inquires/ etc.

Not many brick and mortar businesses are sitting behind the computer either. What market is this a burning problem for?

Most business owners have smart phones & so do their employees.

How is this different than TalkTo? What is the business model here?

TalkTo did not integrate with third party services.

To the consumer, this functions pretty damn close to TalkTo.

My question is: how many times do you actually call a business to find out about inventory, etc.

I remember doing this in the early 2000's, but in the age of Amazon and transparent inventory on sites like Apple, it's a very rare use case.

From a business perspective, I love the idea of providing better customer service, and if this is a feature that customers actually want, then maybe it will work.

Onboarding businesses will be a huge pain in the ass. But you probably know that already :)

Do you guys have an API?

We will yes.

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